Core Infrastructure Initiative Gives Out Best Practices Badges

The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) announced this week the names of the projects that received badges as part of its best practices program so far.

CII brings together technology companies and industry stakeholders with the goal of identifying and funding critical open source projects. The best practices badge program was announced in August 2015, when CII asked the open source community to establish a set of criteria that could be used to determine the security, stability and quality of open source software.

Open source software projects that want to show that they follow best practices can voluntarily self-certify by using the BadgeApp to explain how they follow best practices.

The list of projects that earned badges so far includes Node.js, the Linux kernel, GitLab, OpenSSL, Curl, OpenBlox, the Zephyr Project, and Syncthing. Tens of other open source apps are in the process of getting certified.

CII noted that OpenSSL failed to meet over one-third of the criteria before the existence of the Heartbleed bug came to light, but it currently scores 100%, which shows how much a project can evolve with support from the industry. It’s worth noting that CII was launched in 2014 in response to Heartbleed.

“Open source projects often have very good security practices in place but need a way to validate those against industry and community best practices and ensure they’re always improving,” said Nicko van Sommeren, CTO of The Linux Foundation. “Thanks to the generous contributions by the Core Infrastructure Initiative supporters, we’re able to provide this program to educate developers on security best practices and provide a directory for developers and CIOs to understand what projects have an understanding and methodology that focuses on security.”

The first app to meet all the criteria was the BadgeApp itself, whose developers have described in detail how they approach security in design, implementation, verification, supply chain, development environment, and deployment.

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.